In a comment on my previous post (America’s Empty Foreign Policy: “What Our Enemies Must Understand is … ”) Burgess Laughlin of Making Progress raised interesting questions regarding “moral courage.” To my pleasant surprise, Wikipedia describes moral courage fairly well: “Physical courage” is courage in the face of physical pain, hardship, or threat of death, […]
Ask an American politician, Democrat or Republican, what his foreign policy is, and you will rarely get an answer. He will not tell you what America will do, or what America should do. Instead, he will tell you what America’s enemies should do, or must do, or must understand. Question to American Politician: “What should […]
In his news conference following the London G20 Summit on April 2, Obama said this: In terms of local politics, look, I’m the President of the United States. I’m not the President of China, I’m not the President of Japan, I’m not the President of the other participants here. And so I have a direct […]
1. In 1935, the US Government passes the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This act forces every employer and his employees to recognize a labor union—a coercive gang of laborers not ethical and competent enough to associate with employers by mutual consent—as the sole bargaining agent for all employees if as little as a majority […]
Of course, the government’s doing away with public schools and then giving vouchers to all families for attending private schools would merely be replacing socialism with one of its variants: fascism. A fascist system would still be based on the premise that it is the responsibility of society to provide education for all. A man […]
In America, the unwavering longtime acceptance—by both Democrats and Republicans—of socialist premises is laid bare in the field of education. This excerpt from a letter to the editor, published in Barron’s in 1986, applies even more so today: The idea of universal public education is an aberration of our capitalist system. It is bad enough […]
The opening remarks by Obama at his news conference yesterday evening reflect this underlying premise: Great are the tasks of the National Government in the Sphere of Economic Life. Here all action must be governed by one law: the people does not live for business and business does not exist for capital, but capital serves […]
U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner today announced his Plan for Bad Bank Assets, the Public-Private Investment Program. In a press conference with Geithner today, Obama accurately called Geithner’s plan a “public-private partnership.” The notion of public-private partnership is a recurring theme in the Obama administration. See, for example, this “Summary of Health Care Session” from the […]
This morning, Obama released a videotape intended “to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Obama’s words mean essentially this: You don’t have to fight us anymore, because we are changing to be more like you. Obama said this: My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the […]
Bailouts are wrong, but the government had always implied that it would stand behind mortgage securities sold by the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The deeper wrong was the government’s creation of the GSEs, which financed homes for the poor on promises of someday robbing the rich. That day has come. And now the […]